The Darkroom of Damocles (18 page)

‘I thought the Germans had let you go. So you were rescued, then?'

‘Yes! From the hospital! The doctor there said he knew you.'

‘He lived next door to us, that's all.'

‘So you know nothing about me being rescued?'

‘Of course not. You're not disappointed in me, are you, Filip?'

‘Then why did you tell the hairdresser's wife to say you were at Labare's?'

‘I just hoped the Germans would let you go. Because it was all a mistake, wasn't it? You're not the man in that picture, are you?'

Osewoudt laughed and pressed her close.

‘They certainly slapped you about a bit,' she said. ‘Didn't they have any idea they'd got the wrong man?'

‘No, first they beat me and then they confronted me with a man I didn't know. After that they took me to Zuidwal hospital to have me patched up. They kept me there all day. There was a German guard in the corridor. But this evening I was abducted by four men. They gave the German some injection and tied up the nurse. They brought me to Leiden by car.'

‘And you didn't know who they were?'

‘No. One of them was called Uncle Kees and another one Cor. The other two kept their mouths shut.'

‘Hey, who are you talking to down there?'

It was Labare's voice, coming from the first-floor landing.

Osewoudt went to the stairs and called up: ‘Yes, Labare, it's me! It's me, Melgers! I'll be right with you!'

He turned back to Marianne and said: ‘Watch it, Labare thinks my name is Joost Melgers. Mind you don't slip up!'

He went on kissing her until he could tell from Labare's footsteps that he was halfway down the stairs.

Labare drew them into the back room, where Osewoudt had never been before. There was a man reading a newspaper, who introduced himself as Suyling. He wore glasses with thick, myopic lenses that made his eyes appear absurdly small. His voice had a snivelling quality.

‘Look here Labare, this is not what we agreed. We can't have people who've had their fingers burned staying here. In any case, this Melgers or Osewoudt or van Druten, or whatever his name is, is believed to be the man in this picture. There is simply no point, not for us and not for him either, in letting him stay here.'

The newspaper spread out across Suyling's knees was the issue with the photo of the wanted man.

Looking Osewoudt up and down, he said: ‘Yes, when you were in the darkroom you didn't get to see me, but I saw you all right.'

‘No, I never saw you.'

‘I didn't like the look of you one bit. I'm the only careful one around here!' said Suyling. ‘The moment I saw that photo in the paper I said to myself: damn it, it's Melgers. Where has he got to? I check with Labare and Labare says: he'll be back this evening. We've been here all night with the pistols out on the table.'

Labare now intervened.

‘Where he was last night is irrelevant. We know where he was. He was arrested. He kept his mouth shut about us or we wouldn't be sitting here. That much is clear. But one thing isn't: who were the gang who rescued him?'

‘Are you telling me you don't know?'

‘It's nothing to do with me,' said Labare. ‘Meinarends rang
me up this morning saying you'd been badly beaten and that you were in Zuidwal hospital under German surveillance. He'd heard this from Miss Sondaar. So I asked Meinarends to send Miss Sondaar round so she could tell me herself. He said: fine by me, but then you'll have to find her another address. That's how she got here. All I know of the whole affair is what she told me. Your turn now. So you were rescued. By whom? On whose orders?'

‘They wouldn't say.'

‘And when you left the hospital and got in the car, what did you tell them?'

‘They asked me where I wanted to go and I said I didn't want to go anywhere I'd ever been before. I asked them if they had a place for me, but they said that was out of the question. Then I said they could drop me in the outskirts of Leiden. I didn't mention any address. They stopped on some road, I got out of the car and they drove off straightaway.'

Labare slumped back in his chair, folded his hands over his stomach and twiddled his thumbs.

‘Complete amateurs, obviously!'

He grimaced with such intensity that his hollow cheeks actually looked chubby.

‘Blithering incompetents! Small fry! They go and kidnap someone from under the Gestapo's nose and then can't be bothered to take him somewhere safe! No! They wash their hands of him! Drop him any old where! Make off without even considering that he might bump into someone thirty seconds later, the law for instance, who'd say: what are you doing here? Your picture's all over the papers and I just had a phone call saying you've gone missing from Zuidwal hospital. You'd better come along with me. Abducted, you say? You can start by describing them! God, what idiots they must be! Asking for the firing squad, they are!'

Osewoudt felt himself redden. He opened his mouth to speak but said nothing.

‘Well, what were you about to say?' asked Labare.

‘What do you want me to say? They'd never done anything like this before. Friends of the doctor. The doctor let them in and showed them the way. The nurse was probably in on it, too, because she didn't say a word when they tied her up. Otherwise she'd surely have screamed, I mean any nurse would scream if three masked men burst into her tidy ward and made off with one of her patients, wouldn't you think?'

‘It all sounds rather fishy to me,' said Suyling. The newspaper was still open on his lap. He looked from Osewoudt to the photo and from the photo to Osewoudt.

‘Mr Suyling,' said Marianne, ‘you're looking at him as if you think he really is a criminal!'

Suyling put the paper on the table and crossed his left leg over his right, but the leg wouldn't keep still. It went on swinging while he said: ‘Oh, Miss, if I said all the things I think, there'd be no end to it. I'll give you an example: newspaper photographs are always a bit dodgy, but now that I've taken a good look at it I don't think the resemblance with Melgers is all that strong. How do we know that Melgers is indeed Osewoudt?'

‘That's no concern of yours,' Osewoudt said. ‘I am Osewoudt, but I am not the man in the photo. The photo is not of me, you understand, and the man the Germans are looking for is not Osewoudt but someone who looks like him. I am sure of that. The Germans confronted me with someone called Roorda who said he knew me. He'd spoken to me three days before, he said, in Vondel Park in Amsterdam. But I had never seen the man before, and I haven't been to Vondel Park for years.'

Suyling smacked his lips.

‘Now let's assume for the moment that it's not only the
Germans making a mistake, but Osewoudt too. Like so: the Germans made a mistake arresting Osewoudt, but Osewoudt is making a mistake saying he was kidnapped from the hospital by four gangsters. How does that sound, Osewoudt? Eh? You've been doing a fair bit of embroidery, haven't you? Well, we've all done it. I don't mind. But d'you know what I think? I think the Germans realised they had the wrong man and simply let you go. It's not that I mind, you know, but I really don't see the point of spinning romantic yarns about masked men, cars powered by wood gas, Uncle Kees and Uncle Cor and all the rest.'

He clapped his hands three times, blew a raspberry and smirked.

Labare laughed quietly. Osewoudt didn't say a word, spread his knees, propped his elbows on them, and let his hands and his head drop.

Then Marianne said: ‘How fortunate we are to have Mr Suyling here keeping the score. No possibility, however remote, is beneath the notice of his mighty brain. But Mr Suyling, if you're so keen on getting rid of him, if you think he's a liability, then I take it you know a safe address for him? Because I'm sure you don't need me to explain how important it is to prevent the Germans getting their hands on him again. He may have been arrested by mistake, he may not be the man in the photo, he may even not be Osewoudt the tobacconist, but that still leaves the fact that he can't have breathed a word about this place and what goes on here, otherwise you wouldn't be sitting here pontificating, would you, Mr Suyling?'

It was getting increasingly airless in the back room.

‘Well, Suyling, do you know a good address?' said Labare. ‘And can you take him there now, straightaway? It's already quarter to eleven, I'll have you know.'

Suyling did not reply. No one spoke any more. Quarter to
eleven, thought Osewoudt. Marianne would have to hurry. He threw her a look, but she made no move to stand.

Then the door opened and a boy of about fifteen burst in, waving a slip of paper. He shouted: ‘The Americans are coming! We just heard it on the radio! The Germans are retreating at Caen! We might be liberated next week!'

Suyling did not let go of his newspaper on hearing this.

Marianne, Labare and Osewoudt sprang up from their seats. Labare snatched the slip of paper from the boy's hand. Marianne flung her arms around Osewoudt. She kissed him on his mouth, his neck and, very gently, on his good eye. But her kisses made him sad. Because if the Germans were beaten, what would a girl like Marianne still see in him: an uneducated, unattractive tobacconist, a man who didn't even need to shave and who, in a liberated Holland, would have lost every chance of being either hero or martyr? He screwed up his eyes and pressed her to him, working his hands up and down her back as if there had to be a way he could clasp her so tightly they would never be prised apart.

The voices of Labare and the boy shrieked in his ears. Suyling too made himself heard: ‘How stuffy it is in here! If you would just shut up for a moment, then I can let in some fresh air.'

He switched off the light and opened the door to the back garden. All five of them went outside. Osewoudt had never been there before. He smelled the garden more than he saw it. There were no lights anywhere, and the neighbouring houses looked deserted too. Maybe the people who lived there had not been listening to the broadcasts from London and didn't know that the front line had started to shift and that the war would be over in a week. What was that fragrance? There would be a variety of plants growing in the central flower bed, which he could feel at his feet.

Together they looked up at the black sky. But there were no stars, and the blackness wasn't really black.

He pressed her face so hard against his that the stitches in his eyebrow hurt. She slipped her hands under his jacket and he felt them on his back, through his thin shirt.

He said: ‘I missed you more than I ever thought I could miss anyone. You're going to have to spend the night here, as it's past eleven already. You'll stay with me, I have a small bedroom upstairs.'

These were plain facts, facts that were irrefutable, so much so that he had an instantaneous sensation of having check-mated her.

She said: ‘Why do you put it like that? Even if I could go out all night, if I could come and go as I please, I'd still want to be with you more than anything else. Don't you under-stand? How suspicious you are.'

‘Sometimes I think I'm afraid of you.'

‘Getting arrested gave you a shock, so now you're scared of everything, for no reason.'

‘Do you love me?'

‘Yes.'

‘And when the war's over, will you still love me?'

‘Why ever not?'

He held on to her hair, knowing he was hurting her. He went up on his toes and had to kiss her to stop himself saying: I don't believe a word of it, because I know what I am, and I have a feeling I know what you are too. (I can't be sure, he thought, sometimes the strangest things happen, she may go on loving me, but it's unlikely, if only because things won't be so mad any more after the war. I can't keep on dyeing my hair for ever and even if I did it wouldn't make me the man Dorbeck is. We're alike, but not the same.)

A ghostly vision entered his mind. The war was over, and
he and Marianne were strolling hand in hand in some faraway countryside. Then they saw Dorbeck. Without a word, she went off with Dorbeck and left him standing there. No goodbye, no turning round to wave, just one quick look over the shoulder, only to call back to him: I knew what the man I wanted looked like. Forgive me for thinking it was you. Why must you look so much like him when you're not him? It's your own fault. Mine too, because I'm the one who dyed your hair, I made you fit the picture in my head. Now your hair's no longer black, what are you? A bleached rat.

Or, worse, they had a date one evening and he suffered an accident on the way, so couldn't be with her on time. By chance she would run into Dorbeck at the very hour they were supposed to meet. She wouldn't consciously notice the difference, but she'd say: I love you tonight more than ever before! And when he at last caught up with her she would say: now I understand. You're a fraud, you were always pretending to be someone else.

Marianne slid her mouth away from his and said: ‘This is the longest you've ever kissed me.'

He let her go and looked about. Labare, Suyling and the boy had apparently gone back inside. The door was still open. They went into the unlit room, and he groped behind him to close the door. The house was quiet. Taking Marianne by the hand he drew her into the corridor and upstairs to the small room with the narrow bed and the dingy white counterpane, the straight-backed chair, the small table with the enamel basin and the enamel jug, and the framed picture of a family of ginger apes partially clothed as humans.

Their clothes lay in a heap on the straight-backed chair.

Marianne pushed him away and began to laugh.

‘I say, didn't they give you a bath in hospital?'

‘Yes, why?'

Her laughter became uproarious. He laughed as well and asked: ‘What's so funny?'

‘Didn't the nurses think it was funny?'